Flightplan (2005): C

Back in Panic Room protective mommy mode, Jodie Foster searches for her missing child on an enormous airplane in Flightplan, a knuckleheaded thriller that apes David Fincher’s style and repugnantly exploits contemporary terrorism-related anxieties for cheap suspense. Accompanying her dead husband’s body from Germany to Long Island, mourning widow Kyle Pratt (Foster) finds her sanity questioned when her young daughter (Marlene Lawston) disappears and the crew, unable to locate the kid, determines that Pratt boarded the aircraft alone and, thus, is delusional. Director Robert Schwentke’s gracefully gliding cinematography and Foster’s frazzled performance can’t hide the fact that there’s no plausible way to wrap up this confounding mystery, and so the film barely even tries, merely offering up a group of stock stereotypes (angry Yankees, rude stewardesses, a family full of annoyingly loud kids) and one prominent upstanding character (played by the second most notable cast member) who, from the outset, is obviously the bad guy. For the most part, it’s just a disposable B-movie without much excitement or ingenuity. However, its noxious Arabs-as-potential-hijackers subplot – trading on fears its stupid script isn’t capable of intelligently exploring – is almost embarrassingly idiotic enough to send the film into a fatal freefall.